Cardiano di Granarolo (Bo), June 2012 – It was in Autumn 1962, when Mr. Bauer, pioneer in musical instruments distribution in Italy, bought six Fender guitars (that will be followed by many, many others), and started tripping across Italy for selling that instruments.

They were different times, Italy wasn’t hit (not yet at least…) by the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution, so the electric guitar was considered as a kind of strange, new instrument, watched with suspect and distrust… And yet Mr. Bauer believed so firmly in that extraordinary product of human genius that we all learned to love in the last five decades…

But let’s see the story from the beginning:
It was in 1962 that Hans Bauer met Don Randall in Frankfurt. According to the legend, from the six guitars that he bought in that meeting, he took with him in his car a Stratocaster® (probably a white one), and started tripping across Italy, using that legendary guitar as a sample to be shown in disc-stores that in that time used to be also music stores… but it was a kind of disaster! Talking about that Strat, he used to say: “people didn’t really like it… They used to say things like “looks like a “ghost”, and, compared to the guitar used at that time, it’s weird, “crooked” and too thin…”. But he didn’t give up. After selling two of these guitars (it seems one in Rome and one in Naples…), he kept showing that sample: he was firming believing… maybe guessing, that something special was going on… And, finally, a famous Italian artist (and we are not revealing you who was…) of that time took that guitar on stage for the first time… And then the music played with the Stratocaster became popular in Italy too… So, the Italian artists started to understand that new kind of music as well, those new vibrations that were shaking the rest of the world…

Something you should know about that age:
At that time, sending a letter to the U.S. meant waiting about 10 days minimum for the delivery, and the same for getting an answer from the U.S. In Italy, very few banks were able to work with foreign countries, and everything about that kind of international business (licenses, duty, documents) was very difficult! But since that time, the Italian musicians never had a lack of Stratocasters: the guitars used to arrive on boats that were taking dozens of days for the trip… No containers, no express shipping, no airmail, nothing like that… but they always arrived, among the other Fender guitars that Mr. Bauer loved so much; he had three great passions in his life: music, motors and… Fender guitars! Today we would like to imagine the Stratocaster as a 58 years old beautiful lady, and we are sure that, as a queen of the kingdom of contemporary music, she really requites the love and the passion of all of the people that play music with her, but requites those that spent their life in building Fender guitars and in bringing that amazing guitars in the hand of musicians, like her friend Hans Bauer did.

Today, M. Casale Bauer celebrates the extraordinary goal of five decades of close collaboration with the historic and iconic Fender-brand by introducing a very special instrument, realized by the Fender Custom Shop in a very limited edition (50 guitars, of course…), only for the Italian market: the 50th MCB Anniversary ’62 Stratocaster®!

This fifty beautiful masterpieces are team built guitars, numbered from one to fifty, enhanced by details like the custom neckplate (engraved with the Custom Shop logo and the silhouette of Italy), the AA maple neck and the handwound pickups; the guitar comes in N.O.S., Relic and Heavy Relic finishing, and in S/S/S and H/S/S configurations.

A part of this extremely special limited edition guitars revenue will be given to the Italian Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation (http://www.fibrosicisticaricerca.it/)!